The importance of Cyrillic in Russian (was "pisAl").

Thu Sep 9 19:27:51 UTC 1999

Hi, Seelangovtsy,

I am glad to see that people on the list are interested in seeing Cyrillic come through.
Not so many years ago, we were reminded (and may be reminded again) that the list owners
do not encorage use of Cyrillic on seelangs because of compatibilility problems.

My hope is that members of the list will eventually be able to use Cyrillic. After all,
five of the languages involved use Cyrillic. Typing in transliteration is a pain (for me,
anyway: 15 transliterated wps versus 50 in Cyrillic). Cutting and pasting from the web
becomes impossible.

I admit that technical incogruities still exist. But the three most common e-mail programs
(Netscape 4.x, IE 4 and 5 and some versions of Webmail) can be made to handle the two most
common encodings: WinCyrillic1251 and koi8. Netscape and IE also handle Unicode.

Clearly, some users are going to be ahead of others in their ability to send messages in
Cyrillic. But that's the nature of integrating any new and untried capability into
technology. Just remember how baffling your first session at a Word Processor was. Or --
for those of us who had to learn Russian as a foreign language -- how hard that experience
was.

The solution to getting Cyrillic into your e-mail is not that different from learning a
foreign language: it may be a bit laborious, and you won't communicate properly in every
exchange (different format, unknown coding system), but by not being afraid to consult
colleagues and by not running away from the issue, eventually things will work out.

Of course, many will object that getting a universal system for getting Cyrillic to all
computers easily should not be a moon shot. Well, there are lots of things that should and
should not be. But until Unicode is fully implemented in all software (don't hold your
breath), those of us who want to use Cyrillic across platforms, programs and e-mail will
just have to make due.

Now to the issue at hand:

Alex wrote:

> Mykola Szoma wrote:
>
> > > > - dESX Q ^ITAW (BA^IW NA internet-i) ]O UKRA?NSXKA MOWA
> > > > MA: 40 D3QLEKT3W. nE PAMQTA@ NA QKOMU SAJT3,ALE PAMQTA@
> > > > ]O ^ITAW. pITANNQ: cE : PRAWDA?
>
> I've got your message at once (as well as my reply to Richard Robin).
> Perhaps this is because I am a native speaker. This type of "transliteration"
> is quite readable and I like it more than "Russian-Americution" style actually.
> Because it "reflects" every cyrillic character. But I see Robin's cyrillic
> pretty well! Why is then our distorted? Some list members suggested (in
> private messages to me) that it's got something to do with the upper bit.

The answer, at least for Netscape 4.x is clear: set View=>Encoding to Cyrillic koi8. This
is supposed to happen automatically with e-mail in Netscape (even if you default to 1251).
But Netscape obviously gets confused with some mailers (such as CUNYVM's) and fails to do
this by itself. If you fail to set the encoding to koi8, you get koi7, the funny looking
capitalized translateration that you see above. (Yes, the upper bit is cut off. The
explanation is easy. Keep in mind, I was a high school math dunce. Here goes (the
simplified version): each letter in computing gets an assigned code. In koi8 the assigned
code for lowercase Cyrillic "a" is 193. The "upper" or "eighth" bit has a numerical value
of 128. Now, 193 minus 128 equals 65, which is the code assigned to uppercase English "A".
So if you are writing Cyrillic in koi8 (the default for lots of e-mail) and you send your
mail through a mailer that "cuts off the upper bit," you end up with koi8 codes with 128
subtracted from each one. That produces English letters (and some symbols like @, ^, [.
etc.). This kind of "lost upper bit" transliteration has a name: koi7. It was how Soviet
mainframes used to do Cyrillic.

Unfortunately, some user's "quoted" Cyrillic shows up as koi7 (that mostly uppercase
transliteration) no matter what setting you use. My theory: it has to do with the sender's
browser mail settings (plain - as is versus quoted-printable mime). I think quoted printed
mime is the right setting, but geeks more qualified than I am should correct me if I am
wrong. I believe that mime does a better job of protecting the upper bit with SOME (bit
not all) mailers.

> I've compared different letters' headers and should say that no - CUNYVM server
> transfers 8 bit encoding. The problem should be somewhere either in X-mailer
> or in our local (provider's) servers. Please look:
>
> ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>    Mine:      X-Mailer:   Mozilla 4.05 [en] (Win95; I)
>                          X-Mozilla-Status:  8013
>             Content-Type:  text/plain; charset=koi8-r
>             Content-Transfer-Encoding:   8bit      <------- when I type cyrillic
>
>                          X-Mozilla-Status:  8011
>             Content-Transfer-Encoding:   7bit      <------- using only latin char.
> ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>  Robin's:    X-Mailer:    Mozilla 4.61 [en] (Win98; U)
>                          X-Mozilla-Status:  8003
>                          X-Accept-Language:  ru    <------- notice this line
>             Content-Type:  text/plain; charset=koi8-r
>             Content-Transfer-Encoding:   8bit
>  X-MIME-Autoconverted: from quoted-printable to 8bit by ticom.net id RAA18803
>     ^
>     |______ the last line was certainly generated by my server!
> ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>  Mykola's     X-Mailer:   Mozilla 4.51 [en] (Win95; I)
>                          X-Accept-Language: en,es,uk,ru,be
>
>               X-Mozilla-Status: 8013
> ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------
> So as you can see the only difference is a Mozilla version.
>
> By the way, Mykola, what is "be" - Belorussian?
>
> Now I set my mailer to "quoted printable" 8bit encoding and try again
> Cyrillic:  проверка прохождения кириллицы через сервер.
>
> And at last. I've set my own mailing list for experimental mailing of non-native
> Russian learners. I've checked it already with a help of different users around
> the World and it seemed to pass Cyrillic pretty well (of course it may be needed
> sometimes personal adjustments). You (or your students) may try it if you wish.
>
> You may get there from the site:      http://SashaAndNatasha.listbot.com/
>
> or send an e-mail to:     <SashaAndNatasha-subscribe at listbot.com>
> and then reply to the verification.
>
> After that you are able to send a message (you can write it in English of course too).
> But I would like you to check the cyrillic - I'm quite curious.
> The address of mailing list is: <SashaAndNatasha at listbot.com>.
> If you send there a message without subscription, the server will forward it
> to me - listowner.
>
> Regards
>
> Alex

--
Richard Robin - http://gwis2.circ.gwu.edu/~rrobin
German and Slavic Dept.
The George Washington University
WASHINGTON, DC 20052
Can read HTML mail.
Читаю по-русски в любой кодировке.
Chitayu po-russki v lyuboi kodirovke.